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Digressions
by Ian Duhig
(Smokestack Books, £7.95)
YORKSHIRE’S master road builder Blind Jack Metcalf would roll a handful of stones around the inside of his mouth, testing each one to find an exact size and fit for his ballast.
As a metaphor to describe the masochism of the creative process, it is difficult to beat. The figure of Blind Jack haunts the spaces in between in Leeds poet Ian Duhig’s Digressions, written to mark the tercentenary year of the birth of Irish novelist Laurence Sterne and forming part of a wider collaboration with the printmaker Philippa Troutman.
It is a wonderful collection, richly comic and darkly serious in tone, with a cast list which includes plagiarist folk-singers, vengeful benefactors, and turncoat Irish dilettantes.
Opening poem Blockbusters is a mission statement, in which the irresistible force of Duhig’s intellect meets the immovable object of Sterne’s horse sense.
The fallout is dizzying.
From his home in Leeds, the poet strikes out along Metcalf’s road using The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as his field guide.
Evidently rather struck by the paradox of a blind man having built the straight road he takes from “Back-to-Front Inside-Out Upside-Down Leeds,” Duhig finds himself “lost in Sterne’s labyrinthine novel.” His crafting and control are as robust and sinewy as ever. “Make right your left, back forwards, low your high,” he intones.
Sterne’s “odd little book” certainly seems to ignite something in Duhig, running as it does like a signature through the 26 poems collected here. Perhaps it is Sterne’s contradictory claim that what he was doing was “painting” which so inspires him.
Whatever it is, the verse crackles with giddy energy as Duhig spins out a series of non sequiturs — the “imaginary meteor” that “leaves a real scorch mark” on the page, the signal box that connects “nothing with nothing” and Molly Bloom, who sends herself “love’s blind signature.”
Duhig was introduced to the back-to-front logic of print-making by Digression’s illustrator and this certainly empowers the poet’s knowing sense of the absurd as he fuses Tristram Shandy with Tristan Tzara: “I took to calculating chance … sliding a knife between the pages of my 1783 Sterne-like artists seeking a name for dada in the dictionary.”
If paradox is an abiding characteristic of Duhig’s thinking in Digressions, then getting lost is certainly another. Tristram Shandy is notoriously allusive and endlessly referential and it may well be, as Duhig himself has suggested, the first literary hypertext.
Thus the true purpose of the maze takes on a life of its own. The folklore belief that the devil is only able to move in straight lines allows Duhig to joyfully concoct his own hobbled sonnet: “This smallest of all Britain’s turf mazes was never designed as a tourist trap, but turns like a sonnet to trap Old Nick.”
This is home ground for Duhig, whose work has always been a mix of the cerebral and the waggish and few other than the poet would so gleefully join up the dots between Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, the “ghostwriter” M R James and Byland Abbey, with its mediaeval tales of shape-shifting ghosts.
Most striking of all, the paradoxes which lay at the heart of Digressions is that by choosing to steer a course by Sterne’s picaresque co-ordinates, Duhig has managed to pinpoint his ideas in a way that is deeply satisfying. The high mindedness and buffoonery we have come to expect from the poet is still very much in evidence.
But added to these is an abiding sense of unity and purpose. It would seem that by purposely getting lost, Duhig has managed to discover himself anew.
Neil Mudd